


Mercy in You

by Miss_M



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin
Genre: Choices, Declarations Of Love, Established Relationship, F/M, Insecurity, J/B Shuffled Challenge, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-28
Updated: 2013-10-28
Packaged: 2017-12-30 17:46:27
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,013
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1021567
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Miss_M/pseuds/Miss_M
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jaime would like to enjoy the afterglow, if only Brienne would let him. </p><p>A response to the Jaime/Brienne Shuffled Challenge</p>
            </blockquote>





	Mercy in You

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by [Mercy in You](http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/depechemode/mercyinyou.html) by Depeche Mode. Spoilers through ADWD, I own nothing.

He is getting bloody tired of this. 

The wench is eager enough. For all her blushes and stern looks, she is every bit the woman Jaime always knew she was, and then some. The woman who wields a sword with precision and agility, and the woman who sighs and squirms when he touches her just so. She has come so far as to ask, demand even, though her voice still wavers over certain words. She no longer tries to hide herself when she sees him watching her while he laps at the soft flesh between her thighs, nor do her lips twist with uncertainty and vague horror when he stills her hand on his cock and tells her to put it in her mouth. She has learned to ask, while he hardly ever has to ask any more. They have come a long way, all the way to Braavos, to where Brienne will open her legs for him willingly, a healthy flush of anticipation heating her homely face as he kneels between her thighs, grinning. 

But then, as they lie side by side afterward, sweaty and sated and breathless, it always happens. She turns away from him, she covers herself with the first rag which comes to hand, her face sets in that mulish expression he got heartily sick of way back in the Riverlands, the expression he keeps hoping never to see again.

In all his years with Cersei, Jaime never got to just stay, the woman still warm and close by, content to lie beside him after she’s lain with him. The time was always too short, the fear too great. 

Brienne is at her most free when they spar and right after they fuck. She forgets to feel her size, her face, her scars, the memory of eyes branding her throughout her life, when she lunges and parries, when she lies with limbs splayed, eyes closed, her breathing returning to normal. But as soon as she remembers herself, sometimes even before he tries to reach for her, to tease and hold and caress, she turns her back on him, rebuilds her walls, and locks him out. 

Jaime has had a bellyful of it, it’s choking him like a fist in his throat. 

He lies on the pallet in their garret room in Braavos and watches her through narrowed eyes as she tries to wrestle into her clothes without allowing him too many glimpses of her skin. Her back is as long and magnificent and unblemished ( _and freckly_ ) as her front is scored by scars, on her cheek, her neck, her shoulder, the fresh knife slash across her stomach from a tavern brawl on the docks in Duskendale. Jaime feels a twitch in his phantom hand at the memory of Brienne overreaching, that sellsword with the Ashemark accent catching her with the tip of his dagger before Jaime split his temple like an apple with the hilt of his sword. Had the man been a foot closer… 

The thought cuts Jaime’s breath clean across, so when he speaks he makes certain his voice is calculatedly cool, mocking. 

“It’s too late, wench,” he says to Brienne’s back as she covers her smooth skin with her shirt. She turns, a puzzled frown between her brows. He looks her in the eye even as his words compass every part of her. “I’ve already see it all. Touched and licked it all. Been everywhere.” She is starting to blush; her frown deepens. He keeps talking, dragging it out, his words soft and insidious. “You might as well come back here and lie down again, unless you think Arya Stark is lurking in the alley outside. She might be gone if she spies you coming to look for her, big lumbering aurochs of a woman that you are.”

Brienne’s fingers are motionless on the hem of her shirt, allowing him a good view of the angry, red scar across her stomach. Jaime clenches his teeth at the sight, keeps his sharp gaze on Brienne where she stands unmoving, her hands balled around the fabric as though to ward off a blow. The same hands with which she got him hard, the same hands with which she clung to him such a short time ago. Infuriating bloody woman. 

“Why?” The word drops from her mouth as though she were uncertain of its meaning, of the very act of speaking. 

“Why what, wench? You were vocal enough with my cock inside you. Speak up!”

For a moment her face is a palisade, she has shuttered herself away. In the beginning, when he never said anything but harsh words to her, it all seemed to just slide off. She was a stone, no cracks there that he could see, except for the obvious. Now that he knows her, that he has truly been inside her, she is soft flesh which bruises and hurts, and Jaime is savagely glad of it. And ashamed of his own cruelty. He never used to be ashamed of speaking harsh truths to fools, but Brienne is not a fool and she deserves better from him. But he is so bloody tired of her always shutting him out, like a ram, useful only occasionally, neither needed nor wanted once he is done tupping. Her patience and persistence have made him as good a swordsman as he is ever likely to be with his left hand, yet he never feels so much like a cripple as when he rolls off her, gasping, and she closes herself up and shows him her back like a mountain of glass, more impenetrable than a statue of the Maiden.

She is chewing her lower lip in a gesture he knows well, and he wants to suck that lip between his teeth until she squeaks and sighs and they forget this whole conversation. He does not move from where he lies on the pallet while she strings the words together and speaks them to the floorboards.

“Why would you wish me to lie beside you?”

“Your conversational skills, obviously. Just as the only reason you would wish to lie beside me is so you’ll have something else for which to blame yourself as a failed knight and a woman without honor.”

He knows her. Ever since they received news the Targaryen army liberated Sansa Stark from the Eyrie and the daughters of two mortal enemies reached a mutually beneficial truce, it’s been as though somebody lit a fire under the wench’s arse. She would not rest until she followed the rumor that Arya Stark had crossed the Narrow Sea, her precious vow to Catelyn Stark grown thin as threadbare cloth. Never mind that the elder Stark girl is safe and sound back in her frozen North, sworn vassal to Daenerys Targaryen, the First of Her Name. No, the stupid wench must save the whole world herself or her honor will choke her. 

“Or is it that you’ve remembered it’s a Lannister you just let in, and an old, crippled one at that, hmm? Is that what has you springing away from me the moment your cunt’s no longer holding the reins?” 

He proved oathbreaker in the end, running from his Kingsguard vows, running from the promises he had made in his head to Tommen and Myrcella. He could not have known then that the Dragon Queen would see something of her own lost child in Tommen, see the boy was the least kingly person in all of Westeros, and spare his life. Jaime smiled when he heard how Tommen called the Dragon Queen pretty at the audience where his fate was weighed and judged, though not as pretty as his ( _beheaded_ ) rose of Highgarden, and when told he could no longer be king he asked if he could still keep his kittens. Tyrion is now Lord of the Rock and Tommen’s guardian, Myrcella is safe in Dorne, and Cersei died screaming, all the sins of Houses Lannister and Baratheon heaped upon her creamy shoulders. The knowledge of her passing ( _of how he ran to save himself_ ) is a raw wound in Jaime’s chest, but he is gladder to be alive with it than to have died so his sister would not be burnt to ash alone. He is a wanted man, and not too proud to confess he prefers it to the alternative of the Dragon Queen’s justice. 

Prefers to be here, in this garret in Braavos, a penniless fugitive with one hand and a furious giantess his only company. The woman who knew what his choices meant yet did not judge him, let him come with her and was glad of it. The only one who did not renounce him, though she might just beat him to death from the look of her. 

Brienne is glaring at him, blue flames kindling in her eyes. _Eyes like blue wildfire_ , Jaime thinks irrelevantly, a twitch of renewed lust in his belly. _Eyes like dragon flame._

“Do not speak to me of my cunt, ser,” she spits out, too angry to stumble over the words. “When all you want is a warm body to make you forget the one… the one…” 

She can say ‘cunt,’ but she cannot say Cersei’s name. Jaime throws his head back on his pillow and howls with bitter laughter. When he wipes the tears from his eyes, Brienne has managed to put most of her clothes on in more or less the right order, and has her hand on the latch. 

“Do I ever speak her name, Brienne?” His voice is as level as though they were discussing swords or horses. ( _Honor and Glory. Gone into bowls of brown long ago, most likely._ ) He heaves himself off the pallet and confronts her, she half turned to leave, dressed and defenseless in her riled state, he armored in his nakedness and anger. 

“Do I?” he pursues. “Do I ever call you anything but ‘Brienne’ or ‘wench’ or ‘my lady’ when we fuck? Or even when we don’t? Do you think I ever called her that?” Brienne’s jaw twitches, but he is persistent. “Do you think I don’t know the difference?”

“I know you would prefer her in my place.” She says this to the door, to the latch, not to him. “I know I am convenient. I know you are only here because you have nowhere else to go.”

That is not entirely untrue. He has the whole world open to him, for a fugitive has no place anywhere. But to think he did not choose to come with her…

He backs Brienne against the door, his arms on either side of her, leaning on his stump and the ball of his left hand, close enough to fuck were she out of her breeches. 

“All this time, and still you do not trust me,” Jaime says to Brienne’s chin, for she keeps her eyes trained just above his head. He cannot believe how sad he sounds, how much the truth of it hurts, a knife in his guts. “I am not here because you are all I have left, Brienne. I don’t have you. I could stick my cock in you a thousand times, and still you would be your own.” 

She is frowning down her nose at him, not disdainfully, but as though she fears that if she ducked her head and looked him in the eye his reasons would overwhelm her, swallow her whole. 

He keeps her pinned to the door, coldly furious, but he leans his forehead on her shoulder, tired, so bloody tired of always fighting everything, even her. He wants to say: _I am here because you make living inside my skin bearable. I am here because you give and give, and I’ve always been a selfish, greedy knave. I am here because you never look at me like I am my missing hand, the rest of me just a useless bag of meat and bones. I am here because you opening your mouth and cunt to me is better than I remember proper swordfighting could be. Because your faith and trust almost make up for years of voices hissing ‘Kingslayer’ behind my back, the strain of my honor breaking and mending and breaking again. Because you should not fucking exist, you stupid, stubborn wench. I am here because I know you would have come back, had my cruelty chased you away just now. You would not leave me any more than I would leave you._

What he says into her shoulder, his eyes closed against the warmth of her skin through her shirt and jerkin, like the sun on his face, is this: “I would not change a single thing I’ve ever done. Not a single thing. Because then I would be without you, Brienne. Not just alone. _Without you._ ” 

She needs to know he is speaking to her and her alone, not a ghost or a phantom or a memory. And it is only the plain truth: had he never been with Cersei, he would not have been in the throne room that day, he would not have thrown the Stark boy from that wretched tower, Catelyn Stark would not have arrested Tyrion, Jaime would not have challenged Ned Stark and fled the city and been taken by the Young Wolf. He never would have spent a year rotting in Riverrun’s dungeon, lost his hand, lost everything he once held dear and eternal and irrevocable. Never would have gained something seemingly small and worthless and infinitely precious in the clear blue of Brienne’s eyes when she looked at him and saw him, flawed and imperfect and himself. He may have given her a precious sword with an ostentatious name, but she gave him herself, long before she ever gave him her body. 

What he says is brutal, and true, and so she hears him. She always did have more strength to face reality, because she was forced to it in part, and in part of her own choosing. 

Brienne’s breath hitches and leaves her in a pained gasp, her chest moving under his ear as though he had stabbed her. Jaime waits, motionless, caught in amber, an effigy of himself. Her fingers in his hair, on his back return him to himself, Brienne’s breaths coming faster now, wet and snuffling. He does not turn his head, allows her her pride while she weeps, her fingers in his hair clenched, almost painful. 

He folds his stump and hand around her waist and leans on her. He leans on her and holds her up while she tries to swallow her tears, gripping him to her. He has been leaning on her since the Riverlands, even when they were apart she was to him a source of strength ( _devotion, mercy, love, faith, pleasure, joy_ ). And he thought he had given her his all, all he had left, when he gave her his flesh. His brother and his aunt had been right: a great, stupid, blind, thundering fool.

“Come and lie down with me,” he murmurs into her shoulder, her neck, turns his head at last to kiss her ruined, salt-wet cheek. “Our quest will still be there on the morrow.” 

She nods, sniffles, starts to stutter an apology for her words to him. He kisses her, deep and long and not overtly lustful. If the two of them start apologizing for everything that ever passed between them, they would be dust and bones before ever they left this room, yet no debts would be settled between them, for no debts existed. When you owe someone everything, it is like owing them nothing. It makes that person a choice, every choice, the only choice. It is freedom. 

Brienne starts to turn away instinctively as she pulls off her shirt. Stops herself and turns to face him, her face mulish and bright pink as she tugs the garment off over her head and reveals her small breasts, her scars, herself to him, as if for the first time. 

Jaime lies propped up on his elbow and watches as she divests herself of everything, approaches in uncommonly short, lingering steps. He shifts, quirks an eyebrow up at her, pats the space beside him. Her broad mouth twists in fond exasperation as she lowers herself slowly, her limbs, her thick waist, her broad shoulders so solid yet filled with a fragile grace as she stretches beside him. Her look is dubious when he offers her his maimed arm for a pillow, but she lays her head on his upper arm anyway, his stump resting on her shoulder. _Perhaps this is the right purpose for an arm with no hand_ , Jaime thinks wryly. They are touching all along one side, though Brienne’s heels rest on the floor, over the edge of the pallet. 

They will almost certainly never find Arya Stark anywhere, the Free Cities or the Seven Hells, but Jaime does not mind much. He will not mind if tomorrow Brienne decides they should try searching across the Smoking Sea, though he will argue with her as they go down to the harbor, throughout negotiations with any captain fool enough to take them, and all the way to the edge of the world. There is nowhere he would go alone, and everywhere he would go if Brienne decided to go there. There is nowhere else in the world for him but whatever place they find themselves together, survivors of a shipwreck on uncharted seas.

Brienne’s hand twitches, caught between daring desire and bitter experience. She is tense, as though poised on the balls of her feet, expecting a sword to slash at her face. Finally she wins the battle with herself, and lays her hand lightly on Jaime’s thigh. Her limbs relax almost imperceptibly, but Jaime feels it, sees her breasts rise and fall more easily as she breathes and lets herself touch him. He smiles at the low, sloping ceiling of their garret, his triumph undercut by a rarely experienced sense of relief, a shiver in his heart.


End file.
